SOMETIME SOON, MIGHT LEBRON RETIRE AND STARE AT HIS “KENBASSADOR” DOLL?
The Lakers looked sluggish and lost in a Game 1 washout to the Minnesota Timberwolves, whose physicality was so thunderous that the NBA might not have James and Luka Doncic in May and June prime time
Imagine if LeBron James fails in the first round. Some of us will grab his Barbie doll, known as the “Kenbassador” for $75, and others will urge Bronny to attempt one-and-one playground games with bummed-out Lakers fans. Closer to the point, he might retire from basketball, having to view Anthony Edwards as The New Jordan, which was written here and elsewhere before Minnesota ramrodded Game 1 with a 117-95 washout.
If that happens, the NBA would lose James and Luka Doncic and prompt folks to try a new chant: “Fire Rob!” Actually, no, Rob Pelinka is far safer in life than Nico Harrison, but the league fathers would weep if the Lakers and Golden State Warriors don’t reach a second-round matchup in the Western Conference. Ratings were down two percent in the regular season. The playoffs are filled with cool teams we enjoy — the Timberwolves, Oklahoma City, Cleveland — but viewership numbers might crater.
The players that drive us are Edwards and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The masters are James and Steph Curry, and unless Jimmy Butler provides more than coffee in Houston, the artistry comparisons will move ahead to avant-garde breakdowns. The Lakers were blitzed into awkward sluggishness — with James shaken by a hip flexor strain, Austin Reaves looking like an Arkansas pretender and Doncic slowed by blurs in enemy uniforms — that they seemed stuck in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway.
Will they recover and win four games before the Wolves win three? How about if they stopped talking about winning a championship? That would help, if we rewind comments from the last few days, which went against the grain of the Wolves winning 18 of their previous 22 games and hitting 21 of 42 tries from three-point range.
“That’s our only goal. I think we have the team to do it,” Doncic had said. “I think we have a great team. We have guys who are willing to go to war. The chemistry is high.”
“All you can do is ask for a chance to compete at the highest level and be able to compete for the ultimate thing. And that's the Larry O'Brien Trophy,” James had said.
“I feel like we could win a championship, to be honest with you,” Reaves had said.
“The belief’s there,” coach JJ Redick had said.
Replace it with the reality that Doncic scored 37 points with only one assist. “I guess I gotta pass more,” said Luka, who still hasn’t lost the necessary weight and looked slow in the flow. The world has run out of tears after hearing him re-complain about Harrison, the Dallas general manager, who said the other day that he has “no regrets” about the trade. “It's just sad the way he's talking right now," Doncic said. “I never say anything bad about him, and I just want to move on. The fans, my ex-teammates, I'll always keep at heart. It's time for me to move on from there. I mean, it’s painful.”
Moving on means drilling the Wolves in Los Angeles, not fading into a losing scene. “They’re a great opponent. They’re one of the best teams in basketball,” Redick said Saturday night. “I’m not sure physically we were ready, if that makes sense. And really when they started playing with a lot of thrust and physicality, we just didn’t respond to meet that.”
They were throttled even after Edwards left the game with a calf injury and scored only 22 points. This was an evening when Jaden McDaniels scored 25, Naz Reid scored 23 on six 3-pointers and Julius Randle reminded us why he and Donte DiVincenzo were acquired from New York for Karl-Anthony Towns. Game 2 is Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena. “Nothing different,” Edwards said of the next two days. “Be aggressive. Throw the first punch and the last punch.”
Looking 40 and showing little defensively — a minus-22 on the charts — James will struggle to find legs that match the opposition. “You know this Minnesota team, they’re gonna be physical,” he said. “That’s what they bring to the table. Maybe it took us one playoff game to now get a feel for it and know what type of intensity, the type of physicality is gonna be brought to the game. But that’s just the way they play.”
“We just kind of let go of the rope,” Doncic said. “We’ve got to be way more physical.”
Acknowledge it. James — and even Curry — no longer can win championships. Chris Finch is the Minnesota coach who collapsed to the floor last year and suffered a torn patellar tendon in his right knee. He’s wide awake this time. “It means Game 1. We know it’s going to be a long series,” he said. “We’re not under any assumption that it’s going to be this type of game in Game 2. It’ll be a completely different game. We got a lot left. A lot of meat on the bone out there. A lot of things. I know we can do better.”
Try telling Edwards, who at one point dragged James like a football player he was trying to tackle. In one sense, he says, “It means a lot to match up against him, man. Probably goes down as the greatest player to ever play basketball. Trying to put him out of the playoffs under my belt is going to be a tough one, but it’s going to be a fun road.”
And then, he sounded ready to eliminate James in four games. “I got a great group of guys. But it wasn’t tonight. I learned that in training camp,” Edwards said. “It just takes a minute for us to gel as a new team. It just took a minute for us to figure each other out, and I feel like now, we just go.”
If nothing else, LeBron loves the “Kenbassador” doll. “OK, now we ready. I mean, he might need to do a little lifting,” he said. “Legs look a little skinny. Little frail-y little fellow. Nah, that’s dope.”
He also can listen to Doncic, who said, “I'm sorry we couldn't get the win — the first win. But it's always first to four.”
The Lakers have zero. Dallas has one this week.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.